Thursday, November 21, 2013

1968’s The Year
of the Sex Olympics is the best science fiction film you’ve never heard of,
predicting a world of human-debasing reality-TV shows and constant government-sanctioned/encouraged
pornography. Written and created by sci-fi grandmaster Nigel Kneale, this film
is intense and thought-provoking and still utterly relevant.

Do yourself a favor and catch this nightmare of the
future as soon as you can!

Lurid sleaze abounds
when Bonnie’s Kids strut their stuff!
Sisters Ellie and Myra are nothing but trouble—in and out of bed! But ripping
off gangsters is never smart, no matter how sexy you are. Will these bad girls
make it? To find out, see Bonnie’s Kids!

Forgotten and largely
unseen since its initial release

in 1973, Bonnie’s
Kids is a lost neo-noir sleaze classic that deserves rediscovering. It’s so
much more than drive-in/grindhouse filler: It’s a great twist on the “femme
fatale on the run” theme, one that really toys with the audience, like an
especially malicious cat with a hapless mouse.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Your feedback and
comments keep me going, and I really regret not being able to post as much as I
would like.

That said, since I’ve
subtitled this post “Where No LIE Has Gone Before!” it will be illustrated with
some of the Star Trek images that I’ve
had clogging my computer for too long.

I wasn’t going to use
a picture or a cake, or the actual number “100.”

I love the original Trek—it was the show that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea should
have been.

The Original Trek was really about a U.S.
battleship cruising the Pacific, keeping the peace—promoting the benevolent Pax
Americana. Voyage was just dopey kids’
stuff—but set on the U.S. Navy’s most super-science submarine! Voyage should have been about subverting
Castro and destroying the crops of Laos, not lobstermen, phony lizards and atom
bomb swallowing whales! (Although that was a cool episode…)

For the reviews of
August and September (and more Trek
pix, both from the show and our nation’s cosplayers), please read on:

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Any gripes against
Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) are sniggling ones: For the amount of money
spent—and that bread is all on-screen—this is
about as perfect a giant monster vs. giant robot flick as you’ll find.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

When feisty Barbara
Stanwyck’s hard-as-nails, incredibly successful businesswoman is blinded by
love for the first time in her hardscrabble life, her selfish and immature
younger brother takes the opportunity to ruin her empire.

Sounds kind of
modern, right?

Well, it’s as close
to a “Douglas Sirk” film that Sam Fuller would ever come to: 1957’s Forty Guns.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Thermonuclear
heatwave meltdown in effect, but no
summertime-popcorn-Propaganda-Machine-brainwashing here at LERNER INTERNATIONAL,
no siree!

These five films are
thought-provoking and controversial, yet brush against the Genre Zone quite
successfully—after Blind Beast, we
look at the recently released Upstream
Color, the long-awaited follow-up to cult favorite Primer; then Larry Cohen’s 1977 exploitation biopic The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover,
best watched if you put yourself in a late-1970s mindset. We conclude with
reviews of lost early-1980s UFOlogy masterpiece Wavelength and its abducted aliens; finishing with Kuroneko, another Japanese film, with
bloodthirsty yokai seeking revenge.

Blind Beast (1969;
Yasuzo Masumura)WOW, what a film!

“Why can’t touching be an art
form?!?"

An insane blind sculptor
kidnaps a young model that he’s become obsessed with—in order to recreate the
“perfect “ female form in Yasuzo Masumura’s unique erotic horror masterpiece Blind Beast. The madman cries out, “A
new art form, by and for the blind!”—and he means it!

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

In the last month or
so, I’ve not only rescreened William Friedkin’s films Sorcerer (1977) and The
French Connection (1971), but also caught his latest movie, Killer Joe (2011), as well as read his
recently-published autobiography The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir.

An iconoclastic
autodidact, director Friedkin has always been interested in morally
questionable people doing bad things (sometimes with good intentions, sometimes
not) and the consequences of their actions.

It has been several
years since I last saw any of WF’s work, and for some reason (probably raw,
ugly contrarianism), he had fallen out of favor with me. Wow, was I stupid! His
flicks are GREAT!!!!

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

If you are anywhere
on the Eastern Seaboard on Saturday, you must
make your way to Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater to catch a super-rare,
midnight-only screening of lost exploitation freakshow Mr. No Legs (also known as The
Amazing Mr. No Legs—which is my preferred title).

Directed by Ricou
Browning, this 1979 sleazeploitation anti-classic is set in the
ugliest Tampa imaginable, and follows two grotesquely self-righteous police
detectives (one with the obligatory porn-stache) tracking dope dealers and
corrupt fellow cops, while trying to stay out of the clutches of unstoppable
mob enforcer, Mr. No Legs, a martial arts master with many a violent trick
hidden up his sleeves—and wheelchair.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Last of the Old
School Special Effects Masters has passed away. Now Harryhausen joins Albert
Whitlock, Derek Meddings, L.B. Abbott and a small handful of others creating
special visual effects for the Afterlife—all without computers!

Big Ray was no hired
hand, though:

Harryhausen’s was the
rare case of the special effects man determining the path of the motion picture
routinely—essentially acting as a hands-on producer (even the directors usually
hired by him and partner Charles H. Schneer were non-entities: so as not to
interfere?). His individualized, specific form of stop-motion animation is
intractably tied to the movies they were in and vice versa.

There is a certain tone to Harryhausen’s flicks, combined
with an extravagant but classical sense of fantasy that puts his name directly
on the same level as George Pal and Walt Disney as the Masters of Family-Friendly
Fantasy. You might consider it a level of “cheese” in Harryhausen’s wholesome
enterprises, but it is extremely earnest, and absolutely charming—and drips
with the hard work of one solitary man.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

[This post is part of
the Mary Astor Blogathon, being sponsored by the fabulous Silver Screenings
site and our new best friend Tales of the Easily Distracted—both
superb sites you should visit regularly. This tribute to Mary Astor runs from
May 3rd to May 10th.]

One of the first
“disaster movies”—from even before the term existed—1937’s The Hurricane is a melodrama about two South Sea
islander lovers separated by the cruel twists of their oppressors’ laws—until
Mother Nature clobbers everyone in the penultimate reel.

A fan of the Disaster
genre, I was looking forward to The
Hurricane, but man! Like a white-trash family living in a trailer park in Florida, Texas or Louisiana, I should have known better.

Mary Astor is billed
third in the film, but if you’re a fan of her work, you’d do better by watching
The Maltese Falcon or The Palm Beach Story for the umpteenth
time instead of this depressing mess.

More on The Liebster
in a moment, but first, the illustrations for this post: you might be asking, “What’s
with all the Jack Kirby?”

Well, The King (Mr.
Kirby’s nickname—and shame on you if you didn’t know that) is the answer to one
of the Liebster’s questions (see below) because he is one of my favorite
artist/writer/storytellers ever.

Kirby’s is a clunky,
yet beautiful and psychedelic style that has always stirred my imagination—not
only was his art cosmic, so were his tales: supreme super-weirdness from beyond
space and time, with storylines that were never mundane. No simple stopping of
bank robbers for Kirby! It was routinely gods vs. man vs. demons, with the soul
of the universe in the balance!

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Roger Ebert (1943-2013)
has escaped into the future, into that dimension we have yet to see.

No matter what, fans
of the Cinema of Weirdness have to love Roger Ebert because he wrote Russ
Meyer’s 1970 magnum opus Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of the greatest movies ever
made.

That’s Roger and Russ
above—and if you don’t know which is which, what
are you doing here?

Ebert went on to
script two more flicks for Meyer: Up!
(1976) and my fave, the beyond-whacky Beneath
the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).

As a teen, after only
having the opinions of NYC-centric-intelligentsia critics like Vincent Canby,
Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris to turn to (I won’t bother to comment on the nabobs
and halfwits pretending to be critics on New York’s TV stations—even as a kid,
I knew they were wastes of skin), discovering Roger Ebert via PBS’ Sneak Previews (I can still whistle its
theme!) was a godsend: Ebert was a populist, but he was smart—and, as far
as I could tell, he wasn’t a snob.

Monday, April 1, 2013

[This is part of Silly Hats Only’s White Elephant
Blogathon—for more details about this celebration of
bloated/egotistical/insufferable/incomprehensible/why-did-they-ever-make-that
films, go HERE…and for a complete list of films and blogs tortured by them, go HERE]

The NeverEnding Story (1984)

(Die unendliche
Geschichte)

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Screenplay by Wolfgang Petersen and Herman Weigel,
with additional dialogue by Robert Easton

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Since most of the films screened at LERNER
INTERNATIONAL HQ during February were of a political, if not “grown-up” nature
[reviews below break], let’s start with something silly (that’ll also give us
the opportunity to do some serious desk clearing regarding jpegs cluttering our
files)—

Let’s take a brief look at

James Cameron’s Aliens
(1986), specifically the people-to-xenomorph ratio—what was up with that?

It takes one human (or animal, as Alien3 showed us) to create a “xenomorph warrior” (the type of
nasty critter that popped out of the unfortunate Kane’s chest), so with the 158
colonists captured and “infected,” that makes 158 alien warriors.

Okay, let’s say there were some farm animals and pets
along (although we’re never given any indication of that), so we will be
generous: add another 100 living beings to the list (although some of those
will be smaller animals like chickens or cats; maybe a cow or a couple of pigs,
but not many; it’s a “shake & bake” colony, remember?).

Therefore, there should only be about 250 aliens on
the planet.

And we see the space-leathernecks kill a lot of them.

No, I’m not going through the movie and do a body
count, but in reality, by the end, it really is one-on-one between Ripley and
the Alien Queen.

Not that we’re ever given any indication of that: For
drama and suspense, Cameron makes us believe there are thousands of the nasty critters on that inhospitable ball of rock,
with plenty more creeping about the shadows.

And because Cameron is a master of action and
suspense, it isn’t until seventeen damn
years later that I get around to thinking about. Kudos, sir, well played!

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

January was an arty and
serious month for films viewed here at LERNER INTERNATIONAL: for the most part,
a conscious decision to reinforce a more serious frame of mind, and to give
myself more stimulating and thought-provoking input.

The Same-Ol’ Same-Ol’ just isn’t
cutting it like it used to.

Man does not live by
exploding robots, zooming cars and buckets of blood alone!

I needed cinema that exercised
me; and gave me real stuff to chew on later.